AWS Summit Berlin 2017 Keynote

Klaus Buerg, general manager of AWS Germany

The biggest event AWS had in Berlin with 3000+ attendees, 70+ exhibitors and 60+ breakout sessions.

3 themes: Digitalization, Cloud Adoption and Next Gen Apps.
Innovation Lab: Alexa Demos, Industry 4.0.
AWS Training & Certification, AWS Recruiting.

AWS is creating 200 full time developer positions in 2017, additionally to 2000 jobs announced.

Glenn Gore, AWS Chief Architect

AWS business 40 billion revenue business, 43% YoY growth (Q1 2016 vs Q1 2017).

Fastest growing in the world. A pattern is emerging. Millions of active customers per month are driving this growth. AWS takes all the feedback from the customers to keep innovating to drive the platform forward. Tens of thousands of customers in Germany. Startups customers, taking them from 0 to world-leading businesses. Enterprise and mittelstand customers, starting to use the same tools like startups. Public sector customers, to drive better engagement with their citizens. It changing the way how we live. It will revolutionize. This could not be possible without the broad set of consulting partners. Broadest ecosystem of ISVs.

Another thing that is changing is the AWS Marketplace. A way for you to tap into those ISVs. With a click of a button allows you to test their software. If you don’t like it, switch it off and stop paying for it. If you like it, install it.

Broader in the industry, AWS is positioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide.

Where are we in the cloud evolution?

In 2014, AWS was saying that the cloud is the new normal. In 2015, it became control over your own destiny. You as developers and builders, you are in control. You decide how you build, operate the platform. You are no longer told what you can or cannot do. Many business can test their hypothesis and idea. It is changing the role of IT for business.

With AWS it can feel like businesses have super powers.

Supersonic Speed

Businesses want agility. They want to deliver faster, more features. Take advantage of market features. It’s not going to slow down, it’s going to get faster. Today if you are not releasing on a daily base, that is the pace in our industry. Pace of innovation = new capabilities daily. Pace of innovation is increasing in a more complex ecosystem. Normally in IT these are opposite. If you add complexity then you tend to slow down. If you start using these new trends like DevOps, microservices, you can build bigger more complex systems and be faster and more secure.

AWS is the broadest platform in the world driven by the pace of innovation. You want to have broad services with deep functionality. All of this means nothing if you don’t have the right network.

16 AWS regions, made up of availability zones having 8 or more data centers. Several AZs with over 300K servers. Announcing for Frankfurt region a 3rd AZ available in mid-2017. Tens of thousands of customers in Germany is driving this investment. Amazon Aurora and Amazon Elastic File system also coming mid-2017.

A lot has been happening in the compute space. A broad spectrum of compute capabilities in the AWS cloud. Today announcing Amazon Lightsail available in EU.

Customers achieving supersonic speed today, like BMW, Twilio.

Oliver Krülle, CIO of Deutsche Bahn Vertrieb GmbH

The journey to move DB Navigator to the cloud.

3.5 million tickets sold per month. 13.8 million customers. 2.5 Billion revenue last year. 250 million individual transportation information for the customers. A big challenge for DB to shift this kind of size to AWS cloud.

Challenges in 2016: renew data centers, optimize capacity planning, total cost of ownership, minimize recovery time, improve high availability, obtain geographic redundancy, low risk cloud transition strategy. Many technical and organization risks.

Backsystem of DB Navigator: reiseauskunft.bahn.de. The response time has to be constant, even with load increase and peak times. Strategy of HybridCloud to ensure great CX even in extreme load conditions. AWS cloud set up in parallel to the on premises data center in Berlin. Set up adjustable load distribution to shift from on premises to the AWS center. For the customers it is the best of both world. Risk free transition with disaster recovery, redundancy. DB did all this for the customers to have the nest user experience. HybridCloud is the cloud of DB Navigator.

Invisibility

If you bought a hardware you are stuck with it. Architecturally we are moving from monolithic services to microservices, small independent building blocks with independent scaling, independent deployments, independent security and permissions and improve fault isolation. You can create complex powerful user experience with high degree of reuse using microservices. If you can’t rebuild the microservice in 2 weeks, it is not a microservice.

What had enabled this is containerization. The rise of microservices is enabled by containers. Challenges with running containers today are cluster management, scaling, fault tolerance and securing your environment. Customers wanted container as a service, Amazon EC2 Container Service is the best way to run your containers in production. AWS has the complete container platform to build and operate microservices at scale like developer tools, applications services and core building blocks. A lot of customers have great success with ECS, like mytaxi.

As good as containers are, what if we want to take rid of servers al together. That is where serverless comes into play. No provisioning or management, it scales with usage, never pay for idle and fault tolerance built in. AWS has the complete container platform to deliver and operate serverless applications with developer tools, application services and core building blocks. Customers are using this across all spectrum, from startup to enterprise. AWS Lamba with serverless compute allows you to run code without thinking about servers, it is integrated with 12 services, run your code based on API calls or triggers from AWS services, pay only for the compute time you consume. Customers have great success with Lambda, like Siemens connecting turbines to the cloud. AWS Step Functions has been introduced to coordinate components of distributed applications using virtual workflows. You can start building complex use cases and you never touch the servers.

A new problem comes up: how do I see what happens in them? Using AWS X-Ray to analyze and debug distributed applications in production. Now the system can generate lots of load on the database, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator DAX which is 10x faster, no need to rewrite replication. Customers achieving invisibility like autoscout24. The ability to experiment what services or combinations will work well for your businesses to keep driving the innovation.

Flight

The sense of freedom, decoupling yourself from restrictions. One part are old world databases, they try to protect their revenue and stop you from leaving. As a result customers are leaving to open database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL and Maria DB.

There is no point if you don’t have a migration. On AWS you can migrate between engines, does data replication for you with 0 downtime. Also announced Amazon Aurora, a different approach to redesign databases for the cloud. Aurora has been the fastest growing AWS service in the world. Announced Amazon Aurora Postgre-SQL compatible edition. You start to get flexibility around different engines you want to use. You have the choice, you can move between engines as you please.

Expedia is using Aurora that drives their backend. Expedia migrated from Microsoft SQL Server to Aurora. Data is king. The more you know and the availability to tap into it gives you great advantage.

Bert Depiere, Director Digital Innovations, Grohe AG

Digital water

Data analytics is happening all around us. Even in the bathroom. Innovation around water. Startups were coming with new innovations. Typically connected to internet packed with a lot of sensors. A concept around water damage. 54% is suffering from water damage every single day. That is huge. The cost of water damage is also huge. Everyone is thinking around fire but the biggest one is water damage. Pure water enjoyment. Water damage is not enjoyment. Grohe wanted to fix this. Grohe Sense & Grohe Sense Guard developed. The opportunity is big and it can be done with technology. Checks for flooding, humidity, temperature, it connects to the cloud. Detects unusual water consumption, like when a pipe breaks, and shuts down water. We can only do this with cutting edge cloud technology. Why did Grohe choose AWS? Leading infrastructure, cost effective for consumer products, secure, scalable and high-performing. You are seeing water throughout the day. The setup for the infrastructure: use serverless paradigm, amazon virtual cloud with lambda, redshift, IoT and API gateway. Grohe wants to focus on customer experience, AWS is a flexible way to deploy code, use CI and CD, completely automate the process.

Before a drip becomes a flood use Grohe.

X-Ray vision

The ability to see through things. This is where data analytics come into play. AWS has made petabyte-scale analytics. With Amazon Athena you can sort log data and run SQL queries across that data to get insight. Other services: Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift. Customers are storing even more data in S3. Redshift Spectrum announced to run queries from Redshift to S3. 5 years of 1000 nodes with Hyve vs, just a couple of seconds. This is changing how you think about tapping into the data lakes that your customers are building.

Precognition

What if you can start predicting what will happend based on the history that just happened. What if you can get more intelligent with your data. Start using machine learning and AI to drive insights that will change your business.

Dr Ralf Herbrich, Director of Machine Learning and Amazon Development Center Germany

Amazon has a long history with machine learning in the last 20 years. The beginning was recommendations, now forecasts, reindexing of ebooks, speech recognition, natural language recognition, Echo, Alexa. Focused on making it available for developers. Real machine learning happening on AWS to drive better insights for customers like Netflix, msales, Pinterest.

Unlock value in your data using machine learning on AWS. Building smarter apps with the 5 senses: predict, see, speak, hear, understand. Advanced in software and hardware drive AI acceleration: Amazon Machine Learning, Deep Learning AMI, MXNet, P2. How it works: data on S3 or Redshift – Amazon ML – custom prediction API. How deep learning works: Data on S3 EFS, EBS – Deep Learning AMI – custom prediction API – in the cloud or at the edge.

Use the Amazon Rekognition service to see objects, scenes, faces. Amazon Polly to generate lifelike speech, 47 voices, 24 languages, customize what and how is said, whispering voices, speech marks. Launching Vicki new German voice in Amazon Polly, natural sounding speech including Anglicism/Denglisch. You can start with something that is said with Amazon Lex. Lex runs the latest speech recognition to understand what was said to put intelligence into your apps. Closing the loop to understand your customer and respond to your customers with these features. Support for multistep conversations, that are true dialogs. Some of the customers using Amazon AI in production today, like Duolingo using Amazon Polly.

Force field

What are the security mechanisms to protecting your customers and your business. This is priority number 1. Security by design. In Europe, AWS and the GDPR, AWS will be compliant with GDPR. Also with CISPE Code of Conduct. One threat that customers ask a lot are DDoS Attacks.

How do you protect yourself? AWS was doing this on your behalf. You are protected by default, it is built into the platform. AWS Shield Advanced gives notification via CloudWatch, cost protection, 24/7 DDoS response tam and support, WAF included. Protection for your data is critical and security is the key.

Dr Ella Rabener, Scalable Capital

Founded in 2014, with offices in Munich and London. Grown to over 200m pound assets under management within just 15 months. Cooperation with Siemens Private Finance to offer private wealth management to Siemens employees and their families. World largest and Europe’s fastest growing digital wealth manager. Full service provider, with risk management, diversification, security, support of all devices. Unique risk management technology sets Scalable Capital apart. Security is important when managing people’s money. Regulations is where the partnership with AWS comes into play, for data privacy and data locality, using Amazon S3, EC2, RDS and AWS CloudTrail. All the AWS services that are used helps the engineering team focus on what the company is doing, in delivering the best product and best service for the customers, instead of building the infrastructure.

In conclusion, what this is driving towards is that digital transformation is key for businesses.

There has never been a better time to build. Go build!